One of the questions that anyone who is new to flats fishing asks is “Where do I look?”

The answer is obvious: Look where you can see. If that sounds deceptively simple, it is. When an angler is standing on the casting platform or bow, they should be looking at all of those places where the person poling is not. Most guides make a habit of scanning the medium to far distances–it enables them to get the boat in the right position and intercept moving fish. But many fish are hard to see even in the near distance and some seem to pop up right under the boat. That’s your job: finding the redfish or permit or bones that have been motionless and hard to see or that swam to the boat from up-sun, then announcing that you’ve seen the fish so that the guy in the back can stop or spin the boat, and making the cast as soon as you can.

No matter how good the guy in the back of the boat is at seeing fish, he can’t cover all the locations where fish might pop up.

Meanwhile Australian authorities announced that they”will hunt and kill great white sharks which pose a threat to swimmers along Australia’s western Indian Ocean coastline under a new plan to protect beachgoers after five deadly attacks in the past year.”

A comment last week by a long-time guide about the advantages of poling from the deck–”It’s a heck of a lot easier to sneak up on tailing fish”–got me thinking about the new lines of camo-wear designed specifically for anglers and new for 2013. Columbia‘s Amphibious Assault line is has that distinctly digitized look common to modern military camo, while Simms‘s Cloud Camo goes au naturale. Does either help you get closer to fish without being detected? They likely both do, but only if you’ve first considered all the other aspects of stealth like a silent approach and delivery of your cast with as little motion as possible.

Del Brown used to occasionally wear a fluorescent green hat while we fished for permit, mostly just to annoy me. It worked–he missed more than a few shots at fish that saw him far sooner than they should have. Unless you’re looking to heighten the challenge like that, blending in with the sky ain’t a bad idea at all.

The Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (AFWA) gave its inaugural Johnny Morris Award to its namesake, Johnny Morris, founder of Bass Pro Shops. “John L. Morris developed a love of the outdoors at early age while fishing with his father. He started in the early 1970s with a U-Haul trailer full of the newest bass tackle and eight feet of sales space in his father’s liquor store in Springfield, Mo.”

East Cape Skiffs is another company that does a great job of keeping their Facebook page updated with cool shop photos. Check out some of their latest images, which capture the company’s high-performance skiffs in various stages of production.

World Fishing Network’s “The Mud Hole” is a collection several dozen videos on how to build and finish rods. The videos include everything from finding the spine and guide spacing to attaching heat-shrink rod handles and cleaning up thread with an alcohol torch bottle.

A 39-year-old Chicago man as been sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison for intending to use puffer fish poison as a deadly weapon. Planning to use it on his wife–as authorities suspected–was not part of his plea.